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Tag: tax increases

The George W. Bush administration ushered in a new era of big government. The Obama administration has built on Bush’s profligacy, and the president’s new fiscal 2012 budget proposal would further cement the trend.

Spending as a percentage of GDP has increased dramatically since the surplus years of the late 1990s. As the chart shows, the president’s budget once again seeks a permanently high level of federal spending as a share of the economy:

While the numbers drop from their stimulus- and recession-induced highs, it is not because the president has suddenly decided that he desires a less active government. Rather, optimistic economic assumptions largely account for the slight retrenchment.

Tax increases and optimistic economic assumptions explain the projected rise in revenue as a share of the economy. While the president would like us to believe he’s found religion on spending cuts, he’s actually relying on a rosy economic forecast and sucking more money out of the private sector to reduce annual deficits.

Taking more money from the productive private economy to maintain destructively high levels of federal spending is not a recipe for economic growth. Therefore, this budget proposal is as dangerous as it is disingenuous. Fortunately, it’s also dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled House.

Since joining the D.C. Council two years ago, Michael A. Brown has become the chief advocate for raising taxes on the city’s wealthiest residents, arguing that those who earn at least $250,000 a year are not paying their share.

Yet Brown and his wife have failed to pay the property taxes on a Chevy Chase home assessed at $1.4 million, according to public records. Brown, who earns more than $300,000 a year, owes the District $14,263 for property taxes, the records show.

I guess it’s easy to support higher taxes if you don’t intend to pay them. But I suggest that Brown bite the bullet, recruit Daschle, Franken, Norton, and their colleagues, and form a new organization:

When big-spending politicians in Washington pontificate about “deficit reduction,” taxpayers should be very wary. Crocodile tears about red ink almost always are a tactic that the political class uses to make tax increases more palatable. The way it works is that the crowd in DC increases spending, which leads to more red ink, which allows them to say we have a deficit crisis, which gives them an excuse to raise taxes, which then gives them more money to spend. This additional spending then leads to more debt, which provides a rationale for higher taxes, and the pattern continues – sort of a lather-rinse-repeat cycle of big government.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 57% of Likely U.S. Voters think reducing federal government spending is more important than reducing the deficit. Thirty-four percent (34%) put reducing the deficit first. It’s telling to note that while 65% of Mainstream voters believe cutting spending is more important, 72% of the Political Class say the primary emphasis should be on deficit reduction. …Seventy-four percent (74%) of Republicans and 50% of voters not affiliated with either of the major parties say cutting spending is more important than reducing the deficit. Democrats are more narrowly divided on the question. Most conservatives and moderates say spending cuts should come first, but most liberals say deficit reduction is paramount. Voters have consistently said in surveys for years that increased government spending hurts the economy, while decreased spending has a positive effect on the economy.

I wouldn’t read too much into the comparative data, since the “political class” in Rasmussen’s polls apparently refers to respondents with a certain set of establishment preferences rather than those living in the DC area and/or those mooching off the federal government, but the overall results are very encouraging.

Oh, and for those who naively trust politicians and want to cling to the idea that deficit reduction should be the first priority, let’s not forget that spending restraint is the right policy anyhow. As I noted in this blog post, even economists at institutions such as Harvard and the IMF are finding that nations are far more successful in reducing red ink if they focus on controlling the growth of government spending.

In other words, the right policy is always spending restraint – regardless of your goal…unless you’re a member of the political class and you want to make government bigger by taking more money from taxpayers.

So we know what to do. The only question is whether we can get the folks in Washington to do what’s right. Unfortunately, the American people are not very optimistic. Here’s one more finding from Rasmussen.

Most voters are still not convinced, even with a new Republican majority in the House, that Congress will actually cut government spending substantially over the next year. GOP voters are among the most doubtful.

I fully expected that GOPers would fold on this issue several months ago because Democrats were using the class-warfare argument that Republicans were holding the middle class hostage in order to protect “millionaires and billionaires.” Republicans usually have a hard time fighting back against such demagoguery, and I was especially pessimistic since every Republican senator had to stay united to block Senate Democrats from pushing through Obama’s plan for higher tax rates on the so-called rich.

Republicans voted unanimously against the House-passed bill, and they were joined by four Democrats — Senators Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Jim Webb of Virginia — as well as by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut. “You don’t raise taxes if your ultimate goal, if the main thing is to create jobs,” said Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, echoing an argument made repeatedly by his colleagues during the floor debate. The Senate on Saturday also rejected an alternative proposal, championed by Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, to raise the threshold at which the tax breaks would expire to $1 million. Some Democrats said that the Republicans’ opposition to that plan showed them to be siding with “millionaires and billionaires” over the middle class.

Not only did GOPers stand firm, but they were joined by five other senators (including four that have to face the voters in 2012). This presumably means Democrats will now have to compromise and agree to a plan to extend all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

At the risk of being a Pollyanna, I wonder if the politics of hate and envy is falling out of fashion. Obama’s plan for higher tax rates hopefully is now dead, but that’s just one positive indicator. It’s also interesting that both of the big “deficit reduction” plans recently unveiled, the President’s Fiscal Commission and the Domenici-Rivlin Debt Reduction Task Force Report, endorsed lower marginal tax rates - including lower tax rates for those evil rich people. Both proposals also included lots of tax increases, so the overall tax burden would be significantly higher under both plans, but it is remarkable that the beltway insiders who dominated the two panels understood the destructive impact of class-warfare tax rates. Maybe they watched this video.

The howls of outrage that have greeted the report of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform shows two things: 1) most Democrats have no interest in reducing the size and cost of government; and 2) few Republicans are actually serious about it.

From the initial reaction, one would think that the Commission has slashed government to the bone, throwing the elderly, poor and sick into the street. In reality, the Commission report is far from a radical document. It proposes a reduction in government spending from 24.3 percent of GDP today to 21.8 percent over the next 15 years. That’s a start. But as recently as 2000 total federal spending was just 18.4 percent of GDP – and people were hardly dying in the streets during the Clinton years.

In fact, the Commission doesn’t actually “cut” federal spending. Under the Commission’s proposal, it would rise from roughly $3.5 trillion today to more than $5 trillion by 2020. So, under the terrible “cuts” that the Commission is recommending, federal spending would still increase faster than inflation. This is the old Washington game of calling a slower increase than previously projected a “cut.”

But Democrats appear unwilling to support even this modest slowing in the growth of government. Instead they call for simply raising taxes to support a virtually unlimited amount of federal spending. Republicans, meanwhile, talk about reducing government, but fall back on bromides about reducing waste, fraud, and abuse when faced with the need to make specific cuts.

If we were serious about reducing the size, cost and intrusiveness of government, we should roll back spending to Clinton-era levels. (My colleague Chris Edwards has shown how that can be done.) That would eliminate the need for the tax increases that the commission proposes.

Alas, we still await political leadership with that amount of courage.

I hit a nerve with my post, “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Tax Expenditure.” To recap: The federal tax code has credits, deductions, exemptions, and exclusions that reduce tax revenue. By convention, budget experts call that forgone revenue a “tax expenditure,” a “tax subsidy,” or even “backdoor spending in the tax code.” This is incorrect. To claim that forgone tax revenue is a government expenditure implies that the money at stake actually belongs to the government, which is graciously letting taxpayers keep it, rather than to the people who earned it. Government is not spending that money; it is merely not extracting that money from the private sector. Statists deliberately use terms like “tax expenditure” precisely because that erroneous impression obscures their efforts to raise your taxes.

I understand why you might want to object to the “tax expenditure” phrasing, but surely we can agree that there’s such a thing as a “tax subsidy,” right? If the government declares that fuel-efficient hybrid cars are now tax-deductible, that’s a subsidy to the makers and purchasers of Priuses.

I’m afraid I cannot agree to that.

The term “tax expenditure” is nonsense because not taking Peter’s money, conditional on Peter buying a Prius, is not the same as spending the same amount of money on a Prius. The outcome may be exactly the same. But no one can spend money that he doesn’t possess.

The term “tax subsidy” is likewise nonsense because a subsidy involves giving something to someone else. Not taking Peter’s money, conditional on Peter buying a Prius, is not a subsidy to Peter. The government is not giving Peter anything. Nor is it a subsidy to Paul, even though he profits from Prius sales: the government is not giving anything to Paul, either. Again, the outcome may be exactly the same as a government subsidy. Notably, Paul’s income rises. Yet it does not rise because Paul received a subsidy. Paul’s income rises because the state used coercion in a different way: to alter, for Peter, the cost of a Prius relative to other uses of Peter’s income.

To see the absurdity, consider what it would mean to eliminate a “tax subsidy.” All else equal, eliminating an actual government subsidy reduces the tax burden. Eliminating a “tax subsidy” increases someone’s tax burden. Which is the whole point, isn’t it?

Barro makes more of our disagreement than actually exists.

We agree targeted tax preferences are harmful. (I argue, for example, that the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance operates more like a tax hike than a tax break because, among other atrocities, it denies the typical parent control over $10,000 of her earnings.)

We agree they expand government power.

We agree government should account for them. (Along those lines, the Congressional Budget Office has developed a concept it calls the “federal budgetary commitment to health care,” which is the sum of all federal health spending and all tax revenue forgone due to health-related tax loopholes. The CBO calls them “tax expenditures” – grrrr. I dislike “budgetary commitment” for the same reason: the government can’t commit resources it doesn’t possess. But the CBO is on to something. We need an aggregate measure of “federal budgetary interference in the economy.”)

Finally, Barro and I probably agree that Congress should simultaneously eliminate all such loopholes and reduce marginal payroll- and income-tax rates – perhaps to zero.

I reject the term “tax expenditure” – as distinct from the concept – because it is nonsensical and biases the debate toward more government control of the economy and our lives. Barro asks what term I’d prefer. Until someone comes up with something pithier than “tax revenue forgone due to targeted tax preferences,” I’ll stick with that.

Much of the media discussion of the massive tax increase that looms on January 1 uses terms like “extending the Bush tax cuts” or “tax breaks for the wealthy.” In fact, American taxpayers have faced a particular range of personal income tax rates for the past eight years. If the 2001 and 2003 tax laws are allowed to expire, then Americans will see increased tax rates on income, dividends, capital gains, and estates. So the issue is not “tax cuts” or “tax breaks,” it’s whether we should increase taxes in 2011.

It’s good to see that President Obama understands this. At a news conference at the end of the G-20 Summit on Friday, he said:

I want to make sure that taxes don’t go up for middle class families starting on January 1st.

That’s the right way to understand it. Taxes are about to go up. Of course, the problem is that President Obama does want taxes to go up for business owners, corporate executives, and investors on January 1, the very people whose decisions have the most immediate impact on economic growth and job creation.

And that’s the issue we should be debating: Is it a good idea, especially in a time of continuing high unemployment and slow growth, to raise taxes on investors and entrepreneurs?